by Roger Stone
As Victor Thorn points out in his book about the Clintons and drugs, Roger Clinton was completely out of control, constantly getting high on cocaine, boasting in an FBI transcript that he took cocaine twelve times per day, taking girls to have sex parties at the Arkansas governor’s mansion, and bragging that he could buy a quarter pound of cocaine for as cheap as $10,000.225
One of the victims of Bill Clinton and Lasater was a young girl named Patti-Anne Smith (also Patricia Anne Smith). Bill, Roger, and Lasater were corrupting and then partying with teenaged girls. One of these victims was Patricia Anne Smith, who said, ““I was introduced to cocaine by Dan Lasater when I was 16 or 17 years old and a student at North Little Rock Old Main High School…. I was a virgin until two months after I met Dan Lasater. Lasater plied me with cocaine and gifts for sexual favors.”226
Add then teenaged Smith to the list of those who have confirmed Bill Clinton’s 1980 drug use: “I met Bill Clinton several times, he’d know my name and I thought he was a wonderful person, but I can tell you that he was never acting like a governor when I saw him.”227 Patti-Anne saw him take cocaine two or three times. “He was doing a line. It was just there on a table.”228
Newsmax’s Carl Limbacher did some fine reporting on the depravity of Lasater’s relationship with Patti-Anne Smith and other teenaged girls: “[Patti said] I could get an eight ball [from Lasater] whenever I wanted it. I carried a vial of it around at school. After a visit to a Lasater-supplied gynecologist, who put Patti-Anne on birth control pills, Lasater was making her available for the sexual entertainment of his business colleagues. When investigators tracked her down to gain testimony against Lasater two years later, the terms they used to describe Patti-Anne were drugged-out party girl and basket case.”229
Lasater had turned Patti-Anne Smith into a teenaged prostitute.
“Here’s the police statement of Michele Cochran—nineteen years old when she met Lasater,” wrote Limbacher. “He used drugs and money eventually to seduce me. As a result of the relationship I became addicted to cocaine. Another teenaged Lasater alum told police that after a few months in his orbit, she would sometimes get up and snort cocaine in order to start my day.”230
That is who Bill Clinton was partying with in the 1980s: Dan Lasater and the teenage and even high school girls he was corrupting.
Arkansas state trooper Barry Spivey said he can remember flying Bill Clinton flying multiple times on Lasater’s jet. Spivey flew to the Kentucky Derby with Lasater and Clinton. Spivey also said under oath that Clinton went to Lasater’s residence many times.
While all this was going on, Lasater was using his bond business to launder the cocaine money. “One former broker told me that he never witnessed enough authentic business to justify the existence of Lasater’s office at 312 Louisiana Street,” said Evans-Pritchard.231
By the mid-1980s, the drug activities of both Roger and Lasater were attracting a lot of attention from those elements in government that were not corrupt. “Roger Clinton was indicted in 1984 by a federal grand jury on five counts of drug trafficking.”232 Roger served only a year in jail. In 2001, as he was leaving the presidency, Bill Clinton pardoned his half-brother as if it had never happened.
Lasater, a kingpin who was at the heart of CIA/Dixie Mafia drug running in Arkansas, was also indicted for cocaine possession. The FSLIC also targeted him for insurance fraud. Lasater could have been put away for twenty years or longer, but instead was given a thirty-month sentence. He served part in a halfway house and two more months under “house arrest.” Then, Governor Bill Clinton pardoned him in 1990.
In Clinton Confidential: The Climb to Power, George Carpozi describes how Hillary got Lasater off the hook. He writes, “Hillary and Vince [Foster] huddled with Dan Lasater in discussions that are nowhere to be found in a public record. When they emerged from the dark, they announced that a deal had been struck with the defendant. He [Lasater] agreed to put up $200,000 in settlement of his $3.3 million obligation. That was paying back less than a thousandth of a cent to each of America’s 250 million potential taxpaying citizens who Lasater cheated through his theft of the $3.3 million.”233
Or one could say Lasater, still fabulously wealthy, settled for six cents on the dollar with the U.S. government. A key factor: the First Lady of Arkansas was representing the U.S. government in a case involving a close family friend, Lasater, who was friends with Bill, Hillary, Roger, and Bill’s mother, Virginia Kelley, who had met Lasater at the horse racetracks. Conflict of interest, anyone?
Hillary represented the FSLIC and gave her husband’s best friend the deal of a lifetime. That deal was in the best interest of Hillary, Bill, and Lasaster. As for the rest of society? Not so much.
The story of Dennis Patrick clues us in on how much criminality was involved in the Lasater operations. Ambrose Evans-Pritchard details in his book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton that someone tried to assassinate Patrick multiple times. Why would they do that? Perhaps because Patrick had an account at the bond firm owned by Lasater that was used to launder tens of millions in drug money. Patrick’s account was being used without his knowledge to move huge amounts of drug money. When interviewed in 1994 by Evans-Pritchard, Patrick was forty-two years old. In 1985, when many of these drug laundering trades were made, he was thirty-three.
Evans-Pritchard gave a fascinating account of the murder attempts on Patrick:
“Dennis had been warned long before by a disenchanted broker at Lasater & Company called Linda Nesheim that people with ties to the firm were trying to kill him. ‘Linda kept talking about Patsy Thomasson,’ recalled Dennis. ‘She told me that Patsy was the one in charge, that she was the one who could put an end to my whole nightmare.’
“But at the time it didn’t make much sense to him. “I couldn’t figure out why Lasater would do this to me. I didn’t know back then that he’d run $100 million, or $150 million, or whatever it was, through my account.”
Evans-Pritchard directly asked Steve Love, who used to be a bond broker for Lasater, if Lasater & Company was behind all the murder attempts on Patrick.
Love replied, “They certainly didn’t want anybody to blow the whistle.”234 Love also added that Dennis Patrick was completely innocent of any wrong doing, a pure victim in this case.
One would figure that after all of this Bill Clinton would have considered Lasater radioactive. That was not the case at all. State trooper Larry Patterson, in his blockbuster exposé interview with Newsmax, “More Than Sex: The Secrets of Bill and Hillary Clinton Revealed,” said that after Lasater got out of jail Bill Clinton asked Larry Patterson what he thought about making Dan his chief of staff for his governor’s office. That appointment never happened.235
If one were to summarize the Clinton-Lasater relationship, one could say that Bill Clinton provided the official political protection for the cocaine and drug smuggling, while Lasater took care of the nuts and bolts of laundering the hundreds of millions of dirty drug money. And in their spare time it was drugs, parties, and corrupting teenage girls.
In 1985, L. D. Brown received a phone call from a man named Felix Rodriguez, who said he wanted to discuss Barry Seals. Rodriguez identified himself as Seal’s boss. He had traveled to Arkansas and made it clear he did not like what Seal was doing. Rodriguez had an outstanding career with the CIA, including acting as liaison officer with the Bolivian forces who captured and executed Cuban revolutionary Che Guevera. He took Che’s Rolex watch as a keepsake and a transcript of his interrogation, which he liked to reenact on occasion to friends at his home in Miami. Rodriguez was a longtime confidant of George H. W. Bush.
Brown thought that Clinton had tipped off the CIA that his state trooper had gone ballistic when he found out that drugs were on that Seal plane. “Rodriguez made me feel comfortable,” Brown recalled. “He had CIA credentials which he showed me. ‘Don’t worry about him. We’ll take care of him,’ is how he assured me of the ‘problem’ with Seal.” When Brown again answered the call of t
he agency, he would find he was sadly mistaken.
Charles Hayes, a contract agent for the CIA, was one of the men who ran the Mena operations, and he was interviewed by a drug investigator, Jean Duffey, on July 14, 1992.
Q: Was there money laundering involved in the Mena operations?
A: Yes, the main thing about Mena was the political power and money associated with it.
Q: Would it be correct to say that the Mena operations generated 100,000,000 per week?
A: No, that’s too high.
Q: Would it be correct to say that the Mena operations generated 1,000 per week?
A: No, that’s too low.
Q: Would it be correct to say 10,000,000?
A: That’s about right.
Q: Was there DOD involvement in the Mena operations?
A: Yes, it could not have happened without DOD involvement.
Q: Do you know Larry Nichols?
A: Yes.
Q: Larry Nichols denies that he has ever met you or Clay Lacy.
A: Nichols and Lacy have had their pictures taken together. Larry certainly knows me. If you had robbed Fort Knox, and I knew that you had done it, would you admit to knowing me?
Q: Do Lacy and ADFA have connections?
A: Yes, Lacy is associated with ADFA
Q: Do you know Wooten Epps?
A: Yes.
Q: Do you know Bob Neal?
A: Yes.
Q: Is Bob Neal associated with an underground complex at the Hope, Arkansas, airport?
A: I don’t believe he owns it. You are getting into an area that I won’t talk about. It’s the subject of an investigation.
Q: Do you mean the recently renewed FBI investigation?
A: (Laugh) No, that’s like putting the robbers in with the gold. There is another investigation that I’m talking about.
Q: Is it correct to say that the Arkansas State Police are involved in distributing cocaine derived from the Mena Arkansas operations?
A: Very definitely, and federal people as well.
Q: Do you know Buddy Young?
A: (Pause) I won’t talk about Buddy Young.
Q: Do you know Jerry Montgomery?
A: I won’t talk about Jerry Montgomery.
Q: Do you know David Talachet?
A: I believe I could pick him out of a crowd.
Q: Is it correct to say that David Talachet has friends in high places?
A: Sitting in the White House.
Q: Is it correct to say that Talachet has friends in very high places?
A: George Bush.236
Here again, it bears repeating: the Clintons associate with some extremely shady characters. The Mena drug-trafficking operations caused many people to profit from a shameful business. If this interview is accurate and the operations truly garnered ten million dollars a week, then those involved got away with an appalling crime. The link between the Clintons and this operation seems more and more suspicious upon closer inspection.
There were many Clinton men who linked the governor to the drugs. One man who tried to figure out the connections between Mena and Governor Clinton was former Arkansas Attorney General Winston Bryant.
“There was, in my opinion, more than enough evidence to prosecute a number of people for crimes regarding the Barry Seal case at Mena,” said Bryant.237 Bryant never got the chance to prosecute or properly investigate the connections of various high-ranking officials. In his bid for attorney general in 1990, Bryant attempted to raise Mena as an issue. He was subsequently confronted and warned by Clinton Aide Betsey Wright, who told Bryant “to stay away” from the matter.238
“The Mena investigations were never supposed to see the light of day,” said William Duncan, former investigator with the Medicaid Fraud Division of Bryant’s office, “Investigations were interfered with and covered up, and the justice system was subverted.”239
A memo from Duncan in March 1992 noted that he was ordered “to remove all files concerning the Mena investigation from the attorney general’s office.”240
The money profited from the drug trade running out of Arkansas was embroiled in Iran-Contra, the high-ranking political scandal in the 1980s in which senior Reagan administration officials secretly facilitated the sale of arms to Iran, which was the subject of an arms embargo. The arms sales, it was hoped, would secure the release of several U.S. hostages and the money would also be used to fund the Contras in Nicaragua. The real scandal of Iran-Contra was not merely the Reagan administration’s arms trade for hostages or the illegal arming of Nicaraguan Contras despite the congressional prohibition of the Boland Amendment. The real scandal of Iran-Contra was that the administration was running drugs to support its illegal war against the Marxist government of Nicaragua. The blame for funneling the funds to the Contras was placed on Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North, who sacrificed his career and, for a short time, his freedom. Barry Seal sacrificed his life. Those on high stayed insulated from major damage. Vice President Bush was behind the operation and the center for the drug operations operated under the watch of Governor Clinton.
“All of the drug money, and all of the trafficking of drugs sent all over the nation, came out of little Mena, Arkansas, right under the nose of little Governor Billy Clinton,” said Larry Nichols.241
Authors Sally Denton and Roger Morris wrote a fabulous essay called the “Crimes of Mena,” which was set to run in the Washington Post in 1995. The Washington Post editor, like the Bushes a Skull and Bones alumnus of Yale University, spiked the story. Denton and Morris were forced to publish the article in Penthouse in July 1995.
Denton and Morris pointed out that the CIA drug running at Mena had been documented to the hilt and that it implicated both Republicans and Democrats at the highest levels. The readily available article included an extensive discussion of Seal and his drug running activities and his immunity from the powers that be:
Barry Seal—gunrunner, drug trafficker, and covert C.I.A. operative extraordinaire—is hardly a familiar name in American politics. But nine years after he was murdered in a hail of bullets by Medellin cartel hit men outside a Salvation Army shelter in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he has come back to haunt the reputations of three American presidents.
Seal’s legacy includes more than 2,000 newly discovered documents that now verify and quantify much of what previously had been only suspicion, conjecture, and legend. The documents confirm that from 1981 to his brutal death in 1986, Barry Seal carried on one of the most lucrative, extensive, and brazen operations in the history of the international drug trade, and that he did it with the evident complicity, if not collusion, of elements of the United States government, apparently with the acquiescence of Ronald Reagan’s administration, impunity from any subsequent exposure by George Bush’s administration, and under the usually acute political nose of then-Arkansas governor Bill Clinton.
CIA operative Chip Tatum kept some careful records of his actions during Iran-Contra. One of his most revealing records was an inflight conversation on a helicopter flight to Palmerola Air Base in Honduras on March 16, 1985, between former Arkansas police captain Buddy Young and Mike Hariri of Mossad, which indicated that Seal tragically thought he had an “insurance policy” that would somehow protect him from both prosecution and physical harm. But the insurance policy was canceled in a hail of bullets on February 19, 1986, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Three Colombians in 1987 were convicted of the murder of Seal: Miguel Velez, Luis Carlos Quintero-Cruz, and Bernardo Antonio Vasquez. They told their lawyers that they thought they were working for Oliver North. Larry Nichols says the CIA killed Seal and those captured for his murder were the same ones he was working with in the Contra resupply efforts.
Here’s our theory: The big lie is that the Medellin Cartel murdered Seal; instead, it was the bipartisan American CIA Drug Cartel that murdered him. The American CIA Cartel was running the Medellin Cartel. Seal had turned from an asset into a liability. Author Daniel Hopsicker, who wrote a biography on Seal, concluded that Lie
utenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council indeed used the Colombian hit team to murder Seal (though this was never officially proven).
Hopsicker interviewed Seal’s well-known, highly respected Miami lawyer Richard Sharpstein. Sharpstein said that another Seal lawyer, Lewis Unglesby, was with Barry when the IRS came to seize his property for unpaid taxes on his drug dealings. Seal flat out told them that both he and they (the IRS agents) were working for the same people.
Sharpstein had strong opinions about Seal’s murder.
“Unglesby was with Seal when he retired to a back room.” Sharpstein stated. “He watched as Seal placed a call to Vice President Bush. He heard Seal tell Bush, ‘If you don’t get these IRS assholes off my back I’m going to blow the whistle on the Contra scheme.’”
Sharpstein spoke solemnly, aware of the gravity of his words. “’That’s why he’s dead,’ is what Unglesby said.”
One week after the phone conversation between Seal and Bush, Barry was sentenced to a halfway house. Two weeks later he was dead.
“Barry Seal, you mean that agent that went bad?” Gordon Novel had casually inquired, when we’d posed the question of his associations with Seal.
An agent that “goes bad,” as we understand intelligence industry trade jargon, is one who contemplates talking.
“Seal was gunned down, supposedly by those Colombians,” says Sharpstein. “But they were fed information by the assholes in our government who wanted him dead.”242
Red Hall, who worked with Seal, told Hopsicker that the killers of Barry Seal were known to have worked for Oliver North.
“Chip Tatum, another covert operative who had known Seal and shared confidences with him,” Hopsicker said, “listened with amusement the first time we breathlessly relayed what we’d discovered: that Oliver North is guilty in the assassination of Barry Seal … ‘No shit, Sherlock,’ he replied, laughing. ‘It ain’t exactly the secret of the century, I can tell you,’ claimed Hopsicker.”243